Celeveren, the Epic Saga part I

As some of you know, I’ve got a problem with writing stupidly long epic stories.  One of the classics that people keep asking about is buried on a kin board, and is hard to link people to directly.  So I have republished it as a free e-book.  If you like my prose and have time to kill, you may find it at… #mce_temp_url# That is :

http://www.booksie.com/library/toc.html/toc/260912

Because this one’s pretty lore heavy, I want to explain my own personal philosophy on lore usage.  I’m not doing this to incite debate or start a balrog-wings flamewar, but in order to save those of you who disagree with me the frustration of reading my epic.  This is my well-considered and personal opinion, and you will not change my mind by writing long comments on this thread.

Phew!  OK.  Part of my RL job involves teaching and researching classical mythology.  One of the things we writers of LOTR fiction share with the ancients is a desire to use an existing world complete with characters, cultures, backstory, and history in order to explore contemporary themes and universal concepts from our own viewpoint and in our own voices.  This is, I think, what the Professor meant when he spoke of ‘applicability.’

This desire to come play in a shared other-world is what generated the Iliad (historical hero fanfiction), The Argonautica (Homer Fanfiction), Greek Tragedy (AU fanfiction), and pretty much most surviving Western fiction before 100 AD.  Our Professor was fully aware of this classical tradition when he constructed his own mythology, and I see my relationship to the Lore as the same relationship Sophocles had to the Theban myths circulating when he was hearing the story of Oedipus at his mother’s feet.

In that spirit, I venture into Middle Earth as an active teller of lost tales and use alternate points of view to say something new while remaining true to the events, places, and general lore.  Where there are blank spaces, I make educated guesses based on historical models in order to fill them in.  The diction, characters, and tone are my own, because I am Celebrodwen and not Tolkien.

So, if you think this is something you’d be interested in reading, click, friend, and enter!